Night Blooms

Night Blooms by Narrelle M. Harris

2800 words, 14 minutes reading time
Issue 2 (Spring/Summer 2023)

Some flowers need very specific conditions to bloom. Some people, too.

Of all the things to be found on the decks of a repurposed warship, the Peace Garden on The Righteous Shield is probably the unlikeliest. It grows in the hangar previously occupied by ship-obliterating missiles and city-killing bombs. Instead, lights and heaters mimic the sun cycles of inhabited worlds; irrigation pipes and suspended fans duplicate the wind and rain; microbes are encouraged to flourish in mere metres of introduced soil; plants bud and grow and thrive.

Through branches, berries and green leaves, two young men sit by a pile of vine cuttings that haven’t yet been mulched. Dante is tall, dark-skinned, sturdy, like a tree. Fray is slender, pale, and pretty as a peony. Dante is wearing a crown of leaves and pale blue flowers that Fray has woven for him, with great concentration. Fray’s clever hands usually work with wire, silicon, tiny components, but they have joyfully adapted to greenery.

If the war had eventuated, these two would be in a world of strife for being here at night, without the necessary privileges. On the other hand, if there’d been war, the Peace Garden wouldn’t exist. War on a systems-wide scale renders everyone just so much cannon fodder.

But here they are, laughing in the garden. Dante’s large hands weaving a surprisingly delicate flower coronet, too. He crowns his sweetheart. “Lovely as anything.”

The adoration in Fray’s face is almost painful to see, so Dante kisses Fray’s forehead and whispers, “You’re like fairytales, but true.”

Fray rises up into his big man’s embrace, and they kiss like fairytales too: true love’s kiss.

•••••••••••••

The rain cycles for the Peace Garden aboard the Gantian Union’s The Righteous Shield are clearly posted, so when Fray and Dante are caught in one, they only have themselves to blame.

Dante blinks up into the unrelenting rain falling from the pipes above. It’s a proper shower. Some of these plants won’t bloom without the pressure of heavy droplets on their buds.

Nature’s funny, Dante thinks, with the weird things it’s evolved to need. As he thinks this, he looks at Fray, who has his mouth open to catch raindrops on his tongue. Fray’s never done this before. It never rained where Fray comes from.

Dante thinks it’s marvellous, that he somehow evolved to need Fray and everything Fray does without ever knowing his darling was exactly what he needed, until they found each other.

Fray glances sideways at him, still open-mouthed, tongue stuck out, eyes crinkling with amusement. The rain waters Fray’s lovely brown hair; clings to his eyebrows and eyelashes; runs down his face, obscuring the scar below his eye, and drips from his chin. Fray’s delight blossoms in response.

Dante, unable to articulate how happy Fray’s joy makes him, instead makes himself little for his dainty love. He ducks and tucks his face into Fray’s neck. He breathes in the warm, damp scent of Fray’s perfect rightness which makes Dante bloom.

Fray holds Dante close, and the artificial rain waters them both. Later, in their cabin, dry and refreshed, they cuddle up warm. Dante, as the big spoon, makes sure Fray knows he’s protected now, even in his sleep.

•••••••••••••

Fray and Dante aren’t the sort of people who get noticed.

Enduring indentured servitude in a society where your name is your job. Fray’s escape took years, whittling down his assigned identity from Mainframe to Fray.

Dante’s a good engineer, but many see his slow, methodical approach as laziness or stupidity. Rather than be taunted, the big man finds ways to be small, to vanish from their view.

It’s almost a miracle they ever noticed each other. They wouldn’t have, but they stumbled across each other one night, taking refuge in the Peace Garden, though technically neither had permission to be there. After a nervous start in that quiet place, they connected. Talked. Listened. Fell in love.

Dante adores the garden. It reminds him of the park where he grew up. He rakes his fingers through loose soil and he smiles his bliss at Fray.

The garden endlessly fascinates Fray, because he never saw one in his life before. He sniffs fistfuls of soil and leaves, captivated, and beams back at his man.

They don’t weed or sow. Neither knows how to do those things. Dante and Fray are only pretend farmers–yet they are gardeners all the same. They are themselves seedlings, putting down roots in one another’s hearts, nurturing the budding greenery, and reaching out to the sun they find in each other.

•••••••••••••

Fray grew up in a city so all encompassingly large that it swallowed an entire moon. When he escaped, he found safety in the starship fleet of the Gantian Union. The Union is a technocracy, and has its own problems, but at least it spares billions from the whims of inherited power or the arbitrary cruelty of a kleptocracy. It offered Fray safety, always on the move. He never went planetside. All he’s ever known is recirculated air and climate control, places where sunlight is a radiation hazard and showers mean meteors.

Fray, in short, hasn’t much experience of green, growing things. Even less than Dante. That’s why the falling of the leaves shocks him.

“They’re dying.” Fray is in tears when he seeks Dante in their cabin after work. He holds several discoloured leaves in his hands. “The vines are dying.”

Dante runs a finger over one dry leaf, which is red in the centre, though the edges are brown and thin. “It’s all right, Sweet Bean. They’re seasonal. They do this every year.”

Fray’s brow wrinkles. “Seasons don’t happen on a ship.”

“But they happen inside the vine,” Dante tries to explain, “If the vine can’t do the annual cycles, it can’t grow properly.”

“But it’s dying.” For a grown man, Dante’s sweet bean can sometimes be almost heartbreakingly naive.

“It’s not really.” Dante tries to remember how his mother explained it to him, when he was little and he thought the park he loved to visit was dying in front of his eyes. “Every year the ivy makes itself small so it can rest. Then when spring comes, it wakes up and gets even bigger than before. Captain Yvanne set up microclimate controls in the hangar so it mimics the seasons, to keep the garden healthy. You’ve seen the pipes make it rain, remember?”

“It’ll come back to life?”

“It won’t ever really be dead. It just has to sleep for a bit.”

Fray blinks. “I did that,” he says quietly.

Dante frowns, confused.

“The gang that owned me were awful, mostly for no reason. If they saw me, they’d hurt me,” Fray explains. “I made myself as small a target as I could. Wasn’t always enough.” His long, pale fingers dance nervously in the air between them, until Dante holds them gently in his large, strong hands.

Fray doesn’t say that it was almost like dying, to make himself so small, though that’s exactly what it was like. His existence was so like death that the risks of failing to escape were no worse than the cruel certainties of staying. But he escaped and found a home on The Righteous Shield. He found Dante, who is like sun and water, and he started growing again. All green. It’s been spring for the longest time in Fray’s life now, after years and years of winter.

“You promise it’ll all come back green?” Fray asks.

“I promise.”

Fray seizes the leaves and tickles Dante’s belly with them. Dante squirms and wriggles and laughs and runs away and comes back. This reflection of seasonal cycles pleases Fray so much he begs for Dante to do it to him too.

Dante, naturally, for it is his nature to give Fray whatever Fray asks for, obliges.

•••••••••••••

A mayday goes out to the Empire from the survivors of a Gantian attack on a border station. It’s not a sanctioned attack. Instead, it is a Diplomatic Incident that could destroy everything.

The Righteous Shield is primed and ready: radar arrays, shielding power banks, weapons systems. The crew monitors their stations closely, eyes wide and unblinking, the strain standing out in the tendons on their necks.

The off-shift crew who have no station to watch fix their unblinking gaze on the screens which show the embattled border station. The structure still slow-leaks oxygen. The Imperial survivors can’t use the escape pods because three Corvette-class Gantian Union fliers fire on them when they try.

On the monitors, the pending enemy’s battleship is a tiny blip of impending war, growing larger.

Nobody speaks. Some breaths tremble.

Everybody.

Waits.

Dante and Fray are holding hands while the disaster unfolds. Dante’s left hand is curled around Fray’s right, firmly but not too hard. Fray’s grip, though, is tight, crushing, if Dante’s big hands could possibly be crushed by Fray’s slender fingers.

If Dante minded, which he doesn’t, he still wouldn’t ask Fray to let go. He needs the anchor of Fray’s hand in his, but more than that, he wants to know that Fray is printed on him for all of time. For the rest of his life. Even if the rest is counted only in hours.

Fray is the only person in the room not staring at monitors. Fray has eyes only for Dante. It is like he is memorising every feature, every singular hair, every fine line of Dante’s noble jaw and nose and brow, while he holds tight to Dante’s palm as though their salvation is in that steady, trusted grip.

While Captain Yvanne does everything she can and must to avoid a war that would eat planets and burn suns to ash, her crew calls upon every deity they know. Many have never believed in a god before, but they promise they will now if only, if only, if only…

One mutinous Corvette flies at the prow of the The Righteous Shield: defensive fire splashes its fragments into the void. Another is destroyed when it attempts to flee. The third Corvette loses its courage and surrenders.

“Stand down, battle stations, stand down,” comes the order. Diplomatic negotiations are yet to come, but come they will. The truce will hold.

All across The Righteous Shield, the crew breathes again. They thank their gods. They cry.

Maybe there will be war again one day, but not today, not today, oh bloody hell, thank you Captain Yvanne, not today.

•••••••••••••

Fray holds Dante’s hand tight all the way back to their quarters. Once through the door, Fray only lets go so he can urge Dante out of his boots. Thus unencumbered, Fray pulls Dante into their bed where he tugs and pulls and grasps at Dante until Dante’s on top of him.

Dante, worried his bulk is squashing Fray, tries to move, but Fray clutches at him. Dante goes still.

Fray can’t speak, his breath is ragged, but he wants this heaviness. He needs to feel Dante’s gravity all down his body, pressing into him and making sure he doesn’t disintegrate into molecules or float away into the vast lonely cold of space.

Dante doesn’t know why Fray needs this, but he also does, and so he pushes his face into Fray’s throat, then kisses Fray all over his face.

“We’re okay. We’re going to be okay, Sweet Bean. Ssshh. Ssshh, baby. Ssshh.”

Fray’s soft little cries subside, hushed against the solid certainty of Dante. His trembling subsides too, with Dante soft-kissing his temple.

“It’s okay. Don’t be scared. We’re okay.”

Fray can’t breathe deeply with Dante’s weight on him, but he draws enough breath to say, “I want to be old with you.”

Dante kisses Fray’s brow and his cheek. “You will. We will. Be old together.”

“I didn’t know I wanted to be old with you.”

“Ssshh.”

“Everything good goes away.”

“I’m not going anywhere, baby. Nowhere without you.”

“Don’t go away. Please.”

“I won’t. I’ll always be with you. Until we’re so old we haven’t got teeth.”

Fray clings. “I’ll love you without teeth. I’ll love you without hair. I’ll love you without eyes. I’ll love you and love you and love you.”

“When we can’t see anymore, I’ll hold your hand so you know where I am and I know where you are,” Dante promises between kisses.

Fray manages to laugh. “Okay.”

“Okay.”

“I want to tell you something.” It’s getting harder to breathe under Dante’s weight but Fray isn’t ready to let go yet.

Dante kisses Fray softly on the mouth, on each corner of his lips, at the edges of his weep-red eyes. “Okay.”

The thing is, while they were holding hands and waiting for war, Dante’s one thought was:

“I haven’t had enough time with him. If we have to go now, I wish he wasn’t here to go with me, but I’m glad he’s here too. I want the rest of my life with him. I want that to be a hundred years from now, but if it’s not… I got to be with him. Right to the end.”

What Fray thought was:

“I want to be old with him. I want that. I can have that. I could have had that. I didn’t tell him I wanted to be old with him. I didn’t even tell him...” But he didn’t finish that thought. That thought was a secret he’d been keeping for a long time.

So here in their bed, with Dante’s gravity holding him safe, Fray tells his secret. He shares the good thing he kept hidden deep inside, through all the bad stuff.

“My name…” starts Fray, and then he stutters to a stop because he kept this precious thing safe for so much of his life that it’s now most of his life. The gangs took everything when they took him from his family in payment of a debt. He had no name, only function, and when function was done he’d just be meat.

But Fray remembered his name. He tucked it down deep to remember he had a self, to remember who he was, no matter how much the gangs scarred him to make him forget.

“It’s okay,” whispers Dante.

“My Papa said it was a flower. I remember that.” Fray’s voice is less than a whisper.

Dante kisses Fray’s jaw and listens.

“He called me Mus. But that’s not all my name. It’s more.” Then he can’t speak again.

Dante’s fingers sweep through his hair, slowly, gently. “It’s okay, baby.”

“Muscari, Papa said. A flower. I don’t know what kind.”

“It’s pretty.”

“He just called me Mus. Or Mouse.”

Dante kisses the corners of Fray’s eyes.

“Mus. That’s nice. And Mouse.”

“Mama called me Little Mouse.”

“Sweet little mouse,” murmurs Dante.

“Don’t tell anyone,” whispers Fray desperately, “they’ll take it away if they know.”

“I won’t tell.”

Fray’s breath wheezes from the weight on his chest and this time when Dante moves, Fray lets him. Dante doesn’t move far; he wraps his arms around Fray’s body and gathers him close.

Voice trembling, Fray repeats his precious truth. “My name is Muscari. Mus. Little Mouse.”

Finally, he brushes his fingers over Dante’s face. His lips part and his breath flutters at the tip of his tongue.

Dante feels the words hovering in the breath, and, filled up with a compassionate hope, says, “I can… call you…?”

“Yes,” whispers Fray. “Please.”

“Little Mouse,” says Dante reverently. He kisses his little mouse’s nose. “Mus. My Mus. My sweet little mouse.”

Fray blushes and his weeping eyes crinkle in an overwhelming wash of joy.

“My mouse,” says Dante, kissing his darling man’s face. “Let’s be old together. A hundred years from now. Be my little mouse forever, Mus? Be my flower? I’ll be your tree.”

That makes Fray laugh, a sharp gleeful bark, which makes Dante realise what he’s said and then he’s laughing too.

They laugh and kiss and cling to each other as much in their hilarity as they had done in their fear of losing each other, until they subside at last, giggling.

Dante’s big hand holds his Mus’s slender one against his own chest. Fingers entwined. Dante kisses his darling’s fingers, one by one, and smiles at Fray-Mus smiling up at him.

“I won’t tell anyone,” Dante promises him again. Fray believes him. His name sounds safe on Dante’s tongue.

“Mus,” says Dante again, smiling around the precious shape of this new word that fits in his mouth like it belongs there.

He’ll keep this secret name secret and safe for his little mouse, his Fray, his darling, until they are old, old, old men who hold hands to find each other, always.

And in the meantime, they will tend each other’s hearts, nurture each other’s souls, and bloom.